segunda-feira, janeiro 25, 2010

"Minority Governments and Budget Deficits: The Role of the Opposition"

"Research on the political causes of budget deficits is a still insufficiently explored realm for political science. In this paper we argue that the role of the opposition is a key feature to be taken into account. Governments can be more or less active in Parliament, but they have to pass a general spending proposal annually. If governments are in legislative minority, they will have to bargain with the opposition. As a logical consequence, the interests of the opposition on deficits shall be reflected in the annual deficit results. We develop a theoretical framework in which the opposition has a short term interest in deficits because they weaken governments and a long term aversion to them because, as likely future government holders, they will have to deal with the debt. We prove empirically that, depending on the probability that opposition parties rule in the next term and on the ability they have to weaken a current government with a deficit, they will support different deficit outcomes. We also find that the non-deficit paradigm diffused from the 1990s onwards, with the approval of the Maastricht criteria as the best example, has been a constraint to the internal politics interaction, modifying the previous outcomes."